Archive for the ‘Ford Focus ST’ tag

As is tradition in the collector-car world, a quarter century typically marks a vehicle’s transition from “used” to “classic,” so for a look back at the Class of 2013, that is, the cars turning 25 years old this year, let’s dig up some old photos we took at that year’s New York International Auto Show.

We’ll start off with the Shelby GT500 above, one of the highlights from the revived pony car wars of the late 2000s and early 2010s. Billed as the most powerful production V-8, the supercharged 5.8-liter aluminum-block dual overhead-camshaft engine was initially expected to put out just 650hp, but later SAE testing pegged it at 662 horsepower and 631 pound-feet. Backed by a Tremec 6060 six-speed manual transmission and a carbon-fiber driveshaft, the GT500, which Ford introduced for the 2013 model year, was reportedly good for a 3.5-second 0-60, 11.6 seconds in the quarter mile, and more than 200 MPH top speed.

Of course, the GT500 started at about $54,000 and got about 15 MPG (city, 24 highway) at a time when Americans were still recovering from the Great Recession of 2008, so Ford also had a more economical sporty car, the Ford Focus ST. The successor to the much-lauded SVT Focus, the ST also relied on boost – in this case a turbocharger – to pump more ponies from its engine: 252 horsepower and 270 pound-feet from the EcoBoost four-cylinder, reined in with a Torque Vectoring Control system. Also like the GT500, the ST came only with a six-speed manual transmission, but unlike the GT500, the ST started at about $24,000 and returned 23 MPG (in the city, 32 on the highway).

The GT500′s main competition was, of course, the Chevrolet Camaro ZL-1, which borrowed the 580hp supercharged 6.2-liter LSA V-8 from the Cadillac CTS-V, tweaked a little to fit the fifth-generation retro Camaro. Introduced in 2012, the ZL-1 offered both the Tremec 6060 six-speed manual and the Hydra-Matic 6L90 six-speed automatic transmission, which featured a manual mode. Both manual and automatic versions ran the quarter-mile in 11.9 seconds, but Chevrolet made much ado about the ZL-1′s Nürburgring lap time of 7 minutes, 41.27 seconds, about on par with the Porsche 911 Turbo S.